An ecology of postcoloniality: disciplining nature and society in Malaya, 1948–1957

Abstract

This paper examines the territorialization of the Malayan rainforest by the British colonial authorities during the Malayan Emergency in the decade prior to political independence in 1957. Through the events of the Emergency the Malaysian rainforest was constructed as a space of fear and violence in opposition to the orderly rule of the state. Disassociation from the forest was the visible criterion of good or bad, and the struggle over land became recast as a moral struggle between good (the state) and bad (the Communists). The military campaign in the forest was accompanied by legislation designed to control and discipline the Malayan population in the urban areas especially those expelled from the forests and forcibly incarcerated in the ‘New Villages’. The result was an ecology that allowed the most efficient monopoly of violence by the state and of the means to discipline its subject-citizens.